in cold blood
by blossom in ribcage
Summary: Drabbles for Fire Nation Royal Family Week.
1. drifting

The palace feels like a catacomb nowadays, though it's always bustling with courtiers— whenever Azula wanders the halls, all she can see are the swollen-bellied corpses, the ghosts, the blood that can't be wiped up. When she was a little girl, she was of no importance to anyone, just the daughter of a minor prince; when her father became Fire Lord, she still languished in the shadow of her brother's greater claim to the throne; now, at thirteen, she hovers in the hinterland between child and adult, and there is only one person between her and the pinnacle. She spends pining hours rotating in front of her mirror, scrutinizing her flawless makeup, the armor that's still too big for her, the crown gleaming in her topknot, and wonders what her body would look like with the throat slit or marred by burns, thick and ropey and oozing pus.

Since Mai and Ty Lee left— Mai's father unceremoniously dumped in the bowels of the Earth Kingdom after the loss of her betrothal contract, Ty Lee running away to do acrobatic tricks in some colonial circus— since Zuko was exiled, and there is no one to flaunt her superiority over— since she was taken out of the girls' academy where she could play at holding court to be kept close, under careful supervision— anticipation pools in her limbs as she paces this place like a lion-tiger in its cage, as jealous of their freedom as she is contemptuous of their inferiority. Waiting for greatness, waiting for the rest of her life to start, waiting for something solid to sink her teeth into again.

"Princess Azula, could you please pass the soba?" Hitomi's voice, obsequious and breathy, knocks her out of her deliberation; blinking twice, she realizes she's at the dinner table, and doesn't quite recall how she got there. _Aren't you afraid it'll make you put on weight?_ Azula wants to snipe back, see shock and hurt cross her flour-pale face for the sheer pleasure of causing pain, but she doesn't dare, not with her father sitting on her left.

Hitomi is Azula's fourth 'stepmother' in the past five years, their father uncomfortable without a woman to foist his childrearing off on; she can barely differentiate between them anymore, and doesn't care much about her father's courtesans, as long as they remember who the lady of the house is. Zuko bickered with them, bickered fruitlessly with Father, claimed he didn't want anyone replacing Mother— all Azula fears is that one of them might have a son who could replace her. That in the end, Father might decide to purge his bloodline entirely, and she will prove no less disposable than any of the others.

"You seem distracted, daughter." Father's words send a shockwave of alarm through her; though fire blossoms in his hands, his touch to her forearm is always cold. "I got a report from your trainer today. If you continue to progress at this rate, you may be ready to start with lightning soon."

He never gives her praise, not directly, but she can hear the pride shining through his neutral recitation of fact, that she's capable of the highest feat in firebending. She is precious— the gemstone at the center of the geode, all that was common and worthless chipped away to expose her— and she clings to that like an anchor in all of the uncertainty.

(Maybe lightning will be an even more stable one, the ultimate weapon, one that can never betray her.)


	2. ceremony

... I don't like the comics, so I'm disregarding them throughout and using my own headcanons— also, big warning for marital rape and general Ozai unpleasantness here.

* * *

There is no love and no honor at their wedding, just a hasty attempt to try to salvage a nightmare of a situation; Ursa forces herself to smile and smile at the crowd and fears they can see the shame stirring in her belly. She is becoming a princess, and all she can think about is the sour smirk on the Fire Lord's face as he made a decree he would not have subjected his eldest son or Prince Lu Ten to; she will not be spirited away to raise a royal bastard on some quiet estate, and perhaps that is the worst punishment he could have devised for them.

Ozai does not even smile once. She can't begin to imagine what the expression would look like on him.

Later that night, when they are alone in their bedchamber, there is no pretense of blood on a sheet; instead, Ozai backhands her into the door the second it closes behind them, and she tastes it as it falls from her lip and down her chin, like biting into a ripe peach. His grip on her arms is much too firm to escape, smears her henna and replaces it with bruises that the maids will have to cover with lead paint. When he finally lets go, his anger sated, her entire body feels singed, between her legs raw like a fresh burn.

"You've ruined my life— but maybe with your Avatar heritage, the child will end up a powerful bender, more powerful than my brother's." He pauses as he yanks his pants back up; her dress, made of the finest silks, is torn beyond repair. "That's the only reason I haven't knocked it out of you.


	3. broken

They give her privileges, now— some because she's the Fire Lord's sister, still a princess of the blood, some because she's stabilized enough not to destroy every scrap of kindness in her path. He finds her in the winding gardens, meditating on a sunny patch of grass, her calm more than just the result of opium smoke.

She looks better than she did even a year ago, her figure more filled out now that she's stopped fearing poison in her meals; he doesn't know why she insists on keeping her hair cut short, but it's untangled and clean. Only the white asylum-issue tunic and pants she wears, and the livid scars on her wrists when her sleeves ride up, reveal the truth behind why she's really here.

He sits down beside her, tilts his head up so he can feel the heat on his face; he doesn't mind getting dirt on his robes, not during these visits. She never reacts to his presence until he makes the first move, like she's afraid he's a hallucination she'll reify. "Does this help you any?"

"No." She folds her hands in her lap like a paper crane. "I'm cold, I can't get warm." When she exhales, a puff of flame comes out, a child's first sparks. "No matter how long I sit here."

_You've lost your inner fire,_ coils up inside his mouth, ready to strike, _whatever was driving you to be the greatest bender in the world— you need a new motivation—_ but the three years he's been a monarch have taught him restraint and self-control like nothing else. He would never give her ideas she doesn't already have whirring in that massive brain of hers. "Are you doing all right?" he asks, following their usual script. "If they're not treating you well, you can tell me."

"I love it here," she says, some of her old haughtiness back in her voice. "I can do whatever I please. The orderlies wait on me hand and foot. I'm the princess of my own little island _paradise_."

"Azula..." He shreds a blade of grass between his fingers; it reminds him of when they were children, sitting around the turtleduck pond with their mother, but he knows better than to mention her in Azula's presence. "You're not my prisoner, you understand that, right? You're here because you're sick. When you get better, you can come home."

She doesn't say anything in response, her eyes big and bright like a hawk's, and he takes that as his cue to go on. "You're brilliant, nothing can that take that away from you... if you wanted to be my advisor, or a governor, or study anything like you studied firebending..." He trails off, all of his suggestions consolation prizes. "What would you want to do?"

She smiles the same way she did when Father quizzed them at dinner, his answers inevitably fumbled while hers were flawless. "I'd kill you, of course."

Of course.

His mouth falls open a little, and she laughs, the harsh sound incongruous with their pretty natural scene. "What'd you expect me to say, Zuzu?" She always manages to make the old nickname into a curse. "That I'd let you keep me chained up like a panther-hound, show off how you'd tamed me? Marry me out to whatever nobleman you thought could control me best? You've never been nearly smart enough for that throne."

"Yeah, you were always two steps ahead of me when we were kids," he can admit without shame or pain anymore. "But now you can't even figure out that if you want to kill someone, you probably shouldn't say that to their face."

Her lips, uncharacteristically pale without any red makeup, twist into a petulant moue. "Fuck you."

"I don't think you want to kill me at all."

"_Fuck_ you."

He sweeps some hair off her cheekbone; she flinches, instinctively, but she doesn't quite pull away, either. "Father's going to be in prison for the rest of his life," he says. "He doesn't ask about you, he doesn't want anything to do with you." If he was expecting her to crumple with hurt, she doesn't give him the satisfaction, royal to the end. "That makes you free."


	4. family

"Mom?"

Ursa lifts her head up from the pillow too fast, the world spinning and spinning, and gestures him towards her. Today is a bad day, and those are getting more and more common as the years pass. "Come here, my love." He folds into her side and her breathing eases, just knowing he's there. "I won't let your father send you away. Your health isn't nearly good enough yet."

He was born a month early, her tiny, blue boy, small enough to fit inside cupped hands, and there was no spark in his eyes. Ozai had wanted to smother him right then and there, before his fluid-filled lungs could fail on their own. With all the strength in her hypovolemic body, she'd thrown herself in front of her son and refused to be moved.

"Dad says I need to toughen up." His voice is muffled in the fabric of her robe. "That I shouldn't be at home with you all day—"

"You should be." She presses her lips to the top of his head, inhales the clean, sweet smell of the soap he uses on his hair. "I'm your mother, your family. You wouldn't like—"

"Of course you'll like school," Iroh says in his booming voice. She didn't even notice him approach the doorway; he's rarely in the women's wing. "There's plenty of boys your own age there. Aren't you tired of only getting to play with your sister's friends?"

Zuko's eyes flit guiltily towards her, back again to Iroh's broad frame, filling the room without trying. He squirms in her grip. "... Yeah."

"Why don't you go ask Lu Ten about all the trouble he got into at the academy." Half the words out of her mouth to Azula are meant to scold, but she can't imagine quiet, eager-to-please Zuko ever _getting into trouble_ like his profligate cousin. "He'll tell you there's nothing to worry about." Iroh pulls him out of the bed gently, guides him into the hallway. "I need to talk to your mother for a minute."

"I'm ill, brother," she says flatly; he wrinkles his nose and she knows he can smell the saké radiating off of her, exposing her lies. She can never decide how she feels about her husband's elder brother, but Zuko thinks he hangs the moon and the stars, far more attached to him than to Ozai, and so she tries to hold her tongue. "Can this wait?"

"_Sister_... a plant kept in the shade will never grow."

He uses more obscure metaphors on her five-year-old daughter. "Don't patronize me."

"Don't expose your children to this." He snatches the bottle out of her reach, though it's already close to empty. "Zuko isn't your second husband, you know. You can't just keep him here to comfort you."

Ursa may be a drunk, helpless in the face of her husband's tyranny, but she is still of an Avatar's blood and she sits up straight. "I may be young," she bites out, despite her impudence in speaking to the crown prince this way, "but I can raise _my_ children without your interference."

She sees his temper spark, but like a firework in the rain, sputter out before it starts. "You can let go of him, princess, and he'll come back to you," he says in a long sigh. "You'll have to, eventually."


End file.
